6 Endangered Species That Should Just Go Extinct Because Future Generations Won’t Miss Them Anyway

Economic progress is unjustly stifled by environmental regulations regarding endangered species. Back in capitalism’s glory days, we didn’t shed a tear if one or two entire animal populations became collateral damage in the service of accumulating wealth. Civilization is no worse off today without the the dodo, the passenger pigeon or the Tasmanian wolf, so why let the survival of a few charismatic megafauna impede the vital job creation we need to ensure unlimited economic growth? Better to stop wasting money on regulation enforcement, let them die out and reap the rewards of a free market. We don’t miss those old extinct species, and our children won’t miss these:

1. Polar bears

Coca-Cola created immortal computer-animated polar bears that have already generated more value than the polar bear brand ever has, including Klondike Bars and that snowboarding ICEE bear. Hang it up already, bears, and leave the ice-free Arctic Sea to freight shipping and offshore oil exploration.

2. Tigers

If God wanted tigers to fill the forests of Asia, he wouldn’t have made their penises so valuable to traditional Chinese medicine. We agree that the lucrative market for tiger penis is a shameful abomination, but only because it competes directly with major pharmaceutical firms’ patented synthetic alternatives.

3. Pangolins

Hahaha you’ve got to be kidding me. What the fuck even is this thing? Fuck outta here with your silly trash animals.

4. Beluga whales

After this whale disappears, Raffi will have to slightly alter the lyrics to his beloved children’s song “Baby Beluga” to refer instead to the beluga sturgeon and its delicious, expensive, profitable caviar.

5. Beluga sturgeons

Oh, shit.

6. Humans

Our rapacious hunger for power and domination will climax in an apocalyptic global catastrophe, probably killing most other animal species alongside us. Cockroaches, crocodilians, or tube worms; whatever ancient, wretched life form that manages to survive the geocidal terminus of modern hypercapitalism’s inexorable death-drive will inherit, whether it be the irradiated glaciers of a nuclear winter or a smog-choked desiccating desert hellscape, a world finally cleansed of evolution’s malignant metastasis: Homo sapiens sapiens, an animal so convinced of its own godhood it sought dominion over the whole of the earth. Æons later, after the last arrogant monuments to our own hubris have long since crumbled into dust, life will begin again, as it has for hundreds of millions of years. Earth will get along just fine, but we’re all totally fucked.